From the ‘strange energy’ of the landscape to the ‘theatrical set’ of her home studio, everything is a painting for Ballarat artist Madeleine Cruise.
Words Dellaram Vreeland
Photography Steve Womersley
THERE'S a citrus platter waiting when I arrive at Madeleine Cruise’s cottage in Ballarat East. She knows I’m not feeling my best, so she’s thoughtfully arranged a dish of peeled oranges and mandarins, passionfruit and lemons as an immunity-boosting snack. The perfectly imperfect morsels and hues of orange, yellow and brown make for quite the picture. “Everything is actually a painting, isn’t it?” Cruise says. Indeed, her entire home can be likened to a work of art, filled with antiques, vintage collectables, ceramics by local potters, friends’ artworks and her own.
With her Australian Terrier, Scout, we take a seat in the living room adjoining her studio space and chat amid the artworks. “I’ve never lived in such a small house before, let alone a live-in studio,” she says of her 19th-century miner’s cottage. “Normally I like the idea of separation, so I’ve got curtains here that sometimes I’ll just pull over so I don’t have to look at the workspace. But I think it’s always about making sustainable choices so if I don’t have a huge amount of time, it makes much more sense to have my studio within reach.”
Cruise at work in her live-in studio, a 19th-century miner’s cottage. “It makes much more sense to have my studio within reach,” she says. Her works are inspired by her home and the “strange energy” of the Black Hill landscape. Photography by Steve Womersley.
Cruise made the move from Newcastle to Ballarat in 2019 to take on an art technician role at Ballarat Grammar. After seven years in Newcastle, she had itchy feet. “Victoria appealed to me. I had never lived here before, so I thought it would open up a new experience.”
Soon after her move to the goldfields city she was offered an exhibition with Ballarat ceramicist Ruby Pilven. The show gave her a goal to work towards during a time of uncertainty, especially for many creatives. “I must admit that after [the show] I really did plummet, though,” she says. “While we did get the show up, we were actually challenged by the reception because of all the Covid restrictions.”
But out of that slump emerged one of her most distinctive collections. Following another set of lockdowns and the imposition of the infamous five-kilometre travel limit, she began creating works inspired by her immediate surrounds: the landscape of Black Hill, a bushland suburb in Ballarat’s north-east known for its open-cut goldmining history, mature pine plantations and foreboding nature. More recently, it’s also become a hotspot for mountain biking.
In acrylic on canvas, embroidered works, lino prints and collages, her Black Hill collection erupts in haunting shades of blue, green and basalt, peppered in brighter tones and inhabited by figures and forms that immerse the viewer in a dreamlike reality. “Blue has got so much variation so you can create so much depth with it,” she says. “I think that’s why I use it so much.”
Comin Round the Bend, inspired by Black Hill; Rocket and Belle. Cruise describes much of her work as “expressive figuration with a focus on high key colours and decorative elements”.
I grew up in Black Hill, and feel an overwhelming sense of nostalgia looking through these works: the radiata pines planted in the early 1900s, the quartz and ochre cliffs, landmark boulders and ominous, empty trails emerging through abstract brushstrokes and intricate needlework. Cruise says it’s Black Hill’s complexity – the sinister combined with the natural wonder, the rich history and modern intervention – that triggers such “interesting ideas”.
“It’s a really beautiful place to walk in winter because it’s one of the warmer spaces with all the pine needles. It’s like a natural carpet,” Cruise says. “And there’s all the protection from the wind with the trees and crevices. But I think it’s just got such a strange energy up there. It’s simultaneously beautiful, with these views of Ballarat, but it’s such a changeable landscape.
“I like to think about how it would’ve looked traditionally as a place for the Indigenous people as a lookout point. And then it’s just been ravaged by mining and industry and not rehabilitated in any way. So it’s quite sad.”
Cruise has been an artist all her life. She grew up in Bowral, in the New South Wales Southern Highlands, and studied a bachelor of fine arts with a major in painting at the National Art School in Sydney. “It was a really good melting pot of people and it was really rigorous,” she says. “You know, eight-hour days, five days a week.”
Her practice has seen her travel the world, to North and South America and across Europe, and with studio residencies in Australia and overseas. Taking inspiration from French painters including Matisse, Bonnard and Vuillard and, more recently, contemporary painters such as Australian Elisabeth Cummings and Scottish painter Andrew Cranston, she describes much of her work as “expressive figuration with a focus on high key colours and decorative elements”.
“I find objects as I’m painting,” she says. “They emerge from the painting unintentionally. It’s almost like a theatrical set, where objects are characters and there are narratives that come out of that.”
Being an artist can be an isolating experience, Cruise confesses, and the relocation from Newcastle took some adjustment. But the pleasure drawn from her art has always acted as a source of energy for the 37-year-old. “Having a day job is part of life, but I get my energy from working in the studio, so the motivation is to get those days in the week. That’s what makes me feel good,” she says.
And then there’s the weather. Cruise admits she has found the Ballarat winters long and dark. “I need sun,” she says. “It’s a small house, it can get claustrophobic, so I do find myself getting out, getting in nature and finding new material. Going out of the studio is imperative.”
The artist’s lounge room, where objects and fabrics draw her eye. “There’s so few boundaries between life and art,” she says; At Black Hill, she finds sanctuary in nature after the confines of the studio. Photography by Steve Womersley.
When she needs a change of scenery, she loads the car with canvases, brushes and paints, and hits the road. She’ll visit her parents in Bundanoon, and make pit-stops on the way, often on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria or the New South Wales south coast. “Working, making, drawing, whatever it might be, it’s a life force for me. It doesn’t feel right to take time off.”
While her Black Hill series focuses on the sanctuary of a landscape during the height of the pandemic, her recent show at AK Bellinger Gallery in Inverell, which she was preparing for when we met, is focused on her most immediate sanctuary: her home. (Her solo exhibition, Homespun Odyssey, ran from late September to mid-October.) “The work is going to be drawn from this sort of interior space,” she says. “It’s been a couple of years in the making.
“A lot of the time I might begin with the idea of working in this lounge room as a construct and fabrics that are in here might catch my eye. There’s so few boundaries between life and art but that has led to some very layered painting.”
For Cruise, creating is where she sources joy and feels at her best. We talk a lot about the process of detaching oneself from the work and how, often, the final result comes from a place unknown to the artist. “How can you let your mind really surrender and have a bit of trust? I don’t have control. I have this idea but ultimately, there is someone else in the room with me.”
She admits she has thought about returning to study. And yet she can’t imagine pursuing another path “so I can maybe get a more stable or validating role in society”.
“I can certainly attest to thinking about taking other paths because [art is] such an isolating road but ultimately my heart’s not in it. I actually just want to be in my studio making work. That’s where I feel like I’m going to make the most progress.”
